More from Books
Expelled from paradise
A mixed-race family living in an island paradise off the coast of Maine are made painfully aware that their days are numbered
Make an early start
Shinichi Suzuki certainly believed that learning music is like learning a language, and to be ‘fluent’ in an instrument merely depends on starting early enough
The mock king of Madagascar
David Graeber imagines the 17th-century buccaneer establishing an enlightened kingdom in the Indian Ocean where all goods were held in common
Loved and lost
The third act of Morrison’s family saga focuses on Gill, the once loving and generous sister he was so close to but was unable to save
Cosmo Landesman has no time for feel-good-grief memoirs
The heartbroken father endlessly relives his son’s suicide, raking over every moment of Jack’s battle with depression and drug addiction
The vexing problem of ancient Greek mathematics
Pythagoras, Euclid and Archimedes viewed mathematics in a very different way to us, but Reviel Netz helps us glimpse the minds of antiquity’s great thinkers
Cold-blooded murder in Amazonia
Criminal syndicates, corrupt officials and faceless assassins now control the increasingly depleted rainforest, killing or enslaving all who stand in their way
The stone boats of Celtic saints inspire a bizarre pilgrimage
In homage to St Magnus, the stonemason Beatrice Searle carries a heavy load from Orkney to Trondheim, following an ancient pilgrims’ way
The lost world of Jewish Rhodes
Stella Levi, an Auschwitz survivor, recalls the vibrant, long-established Jewish community that existed in the Dodecanese before the Nazi deportations in 1944
Nursing grievances in the Crimean War
When Florence Nightingale was joined in Scutari by groups of volunteer nuns, tensions among them soon imperilled the entire female nursing experiment
How the Muppets went to Moscow as ambassadors for democracy
In 1993, Natasha Lance Rogoff was tasked with introducing the American puppets to Russia in the hope of cultivating peace, love and understanding
The Scarlet Pimpernel of the Vatican
Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty’s thrilling mission to save the lives of 6,500 Jews and Allied soldiers in Nazi-occupied Rome doesn’t quite get the memorial it deserves
Butchered to make a Roman holiday: cruelty to animals in and out of the Colosseum
Brutality might be expected of a people who fed each other to lions – but it extended even to the elephants the Romans regarded as soulmates
A playful provocateur
The world-class musician describes his early desire to shock, his delight in the sensual, his life-changing relationship with Catholicism and, finally, his debut at Carnegie Hall
A bleak vision of adolescence: The Shards, by Bret Easton Ellis, reviewed
A group of privileged teenagers at Buckley School, Los Angeles medicate themselves on champagne, cocaine and mindless sex – until something awful happens
If Lady Mendl didn’t exist, it would be necessary to invent her
The flamboyant hostess and ‘psychic’ interior decorator does seem like a comic creation – but she was real enough, and perhaps madder than Ludwig Bemelmans lets on
What the Wife of Bath teaches us about misogyny
The lovable rounded character of The Canterbury Tales has been ridiculed over the centuries for her sexual appetites, completely subverting Chaucer’s focus
Sharp practice
Thackeray’s amoral schemer is recast as a ruthless tabloid journalist, splashing gossip, hacking phones and pursuing personal vendettas
The best of liberal thought
Shocked by the authoritarianism of Cuba and the USSR, the Peruvian writer turned his back on communism in the 1960s, influenced by seven liberal European thinkers
Henri Christophe, King of Haiti, was not such a ridiculous figure
He certainly had delusions of grandeur, but his ambition to educate a people newly emerged from slavery showed a true visionary spirit
Day of vengeance
A festive gathering in the depths of rural France is fatally disrupted by a trio of sinister strangers
Allies, not friends
The initial reluctance of Britain, France, Poland and the US to share intelligence allowed the Nazis to hone their deception skills to early advantage
Was the closure of the grammar schools really such a tragedy?
Peter Hitchens is in no doubt that it was. But a dominant, self-perpetuating meritocratic elite, all head and no heart, might also have presented problems
Victorian science fiction soon ceased to be fanciful
Iwan Rhys Morus describes how novelists’ futuristic visions began to be realised by engineers – though the course of invention is more random than he imagines
Cakes and ale
There has never been a golden age or even a very stable one, says Diane Purkiss, in a serious consideration of how English food has changed over time
